I could not find any path such as the man at Timgad had told me of, and such as my map showed, but what I had to do was clear, for down in the plain below me a long line of palms marked an oasis and the passage of that clear river which, as I knew, comes tumbling down from the Atlas to be lost at last in the Sahara. No feature in the unusual view below me was more characteristic than this: that green leaves were thus bunched together, rare, isolated and exceptional, as with us are waste rocks or heaths, while the wide sweep of the land, which with us is all fields and trees and boundaries, here is abandoned altogether. It was not the least part of my wonder in this new place to find myself walking as I chose over an earth that was quite barren, with no history, no obstacles, and no owner, towards a patch of human land whose grove looked as an island looks from the sea. As I neared those palms I found first the railway, and then the strong high road which the astonishing French have driven right out here into nothingness. [Illustration] [Sidenote: The Arab Riding] I did not turn to enter the native village. I had no appetite to see more of the desert than I had seen in my view from the hill. I had then seen a limit beyond which men of my sort cannot go, and I was content to leave it to those others who will remain for ever the enemies of our Europe. I saw one on the road: a true Arab, what the French call “An Arab of the Great Tent,” not what we and the Algerians are, but a rider of that race which makes one family from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic. He was on a horse going up before me into the hills, with the snow of Aurès above him, and between us a tall palm. As I watched him and admired his stately riding, I said to myself: “This is how it will end: they shall leave us to our vineyards, our statues, and our harbour-towns, and we will leave them to their desert here beyond the hills, for it is their native place.... [Sidenote: The Ksar] Then we shall have reached our goal, for we shall be back where the Romans were, and the empire will be fully restored. For all things return at last to their origins, and Europe must return to hers. They must forget our cities which they ruined, and which we are so painfully rebuilding, and we will not covet their little glaring _ksours_ which they build upon crags above the desert, and which are quite white in the sun.... This is how it will end.” [Illustration] When I came to that curious cleft or gorge through which the river, the road and the railway all make their way together, one above the other, from the plateau down into the desert plain, I saw a Christian house after so many miles and days. I went in at once, drank wine, and asked the hour of the train, for I was tired of this land. I was hurrying to get back to reasonable shrines, and to smell the sea. [Illustration] [Sidenote: The Return]